The women effect redux and other unrelated links

Thanks Anita for finding another interesting article discussing the pitfalls of female centered development projects.

And while we are on the gender topic...here is an interesting new paper on women, transactional sex and social insurance. Using diaries of sex workers in West Kenya, the authors find that regular clients are a main source of insurance against income shocks.

A forthcoming book by Abhijiit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offers some critical insights on the main challenges faced by development policy today. Not sure about the release date but it should be soon...

The definition of 'Irony'

As some of you may be aware, the son of Muammar El-Qaddafi, Saif Al Qaddafi, recently completed a PhD here at the LSE in the Government department. Here is a link to the full text of his PhD dissertation

A review of two weeks of DV409

Thanks Anita for spotting a review of ALL the topics we addressed in DV409 in the last two weeks.
It discusses the impact of microcredit, how supposedly productive loans are used to satisfy consumption needs, on how not everyone wants to become an entrepreneur and on how the poor need access savings instruments and insurance products....all courtesy of the BBC.

Paying to go to the gym and other problems of self control

As we briefly discussed in class today, consumers tend to be farsighted planners but myopic doers, a terminology introduced by one of the leading figures in behavioural economics, Richard Thaler.

Della Vigna and Malmendier find  some evidence for this when they look at patterns of commitment and attendance of 3 large gyms in the US. Gym goers are often overly optimistic about the probability of going to the gym, subscribing to a monthly membership contract that is more costly in the end than any drop in or 10-class pass contract. You can find a summary of these findings here.

Here  and here  are even more extreme and sophisticated versions of commitment devices to address this problem.

Problems of self control go of course, well beyond gym memberships. A recent paper  describes a randomized experiment that investigates whether problems of self control apply to how people choose to be compensated for work. A shorter summary of the paper can be found here.

The number of potential charter cities in perspective....

Success or no Success?

Here is a list with potential to cheer us up...

A good exercise would be to carefully go through this list and identify whether we have reliable empirical evidence to believe any causal relationship between government policy and stated successful outcomes. This is particularly important in case these "success stories" translate into policy recommendations for a powerful and influential agency like the World Bank. For now, beyond the issues around causality and attribution, the most important contribution of this list is to shed light on the positive side of African development in recent years. This is important as general audiences grow ever more disillusioned with African stories of corruption, pervasive poverty and forseeable failures in reaching the Millennium Development goals by 2015...  

The Millenium Villages debate continues...

Suggested reading from Ingrid!